Baron Davis' The Black Santa Company

As a white-passing person of color, I was taught to believe in a “color-blind” society. Everyone has their triumphs and defeats, but everyone is more or less the same and owing to some nebulous stuff in the 60s or whatever everyone is now equal because sitcoms with PoC and queer people are on TV, the end, amen. Of my own accord, I was also very, very interested in the NBA where the "color-blind" ideology thrives.
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Oscars 2017: Are You Shining Just for Me?

*Editor's Note: This article is part of a review series by Alex Carrigan from February 14-24. To learn about the series, visit this post.

Well, this was an interesting experiment. Compared to last year, where everything felt a lot more structured and perfectly timed, this year’s Oscar challenge was a lot harder to pin down. It wasn’t because I had to change my schedule or fell behind on some days, but unlike last year, it didn’t let me feel comfortable. Last year, I started with good movies, then had mediocre films, then ended with some of the better films of the bunch. It felt like a plot arc, in a way, so it left me feeling somewhat comfortable about repeating the challenge for the next year.​

Fences: Break it All Down

*Editor's Note: This article is part of a review series by Alex Carrigan from February 14-24. To learn about the series, visit this post.

I was really upset when I had to reschedule Fences due to some trouble seeing it in theaters with a group. Not only did it mean I had to awkwardly rework the Oscar series and start the series off with a film I was already familiar with, it meant I had to wait the longest to see it. It also did not help I had to watch Viola Davis give a powerhouse performance in this week’s How to Get Away with Murder to make me even more upset that I had to wait longer to see this movie. But here I am, on the last day of the Oscar series, and if anything, I think that rescheduling ended up being a blessing in disguise.​

How Lynchian is Christian Entertainment?

Some Christian movies and shows are undoubtedly produced with good intentions, to help people cope with life, and some are produced simply to make money. Yet either way, they are often made in fear, because some Christians are afraid of art. Like Plato, some Christians recognize that art has a huge impact on the public psyche, and they know that poets lie.​

‘I think about tomorrow’: A Syrian refugee family begins a new life in Virginia

RICHMOND, Va. – At the center of a suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Richmond’s city limits, a collection of small white houses sit quietly. Outside, the taut winter air is split open by a group of grade-school children streaking past each other in relentless pursuit of a soccer ball, shouting breathlessly in their native tongues.

Arrival: ​Explaining it Clearly

*Editor's Note: This article is part of a review series by Alex Carrigan from February 14-24. To learn about the series, visit this post.

Science-fiction is a genre that doesn’t get the love it deserves. There are a few notable exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, genre films like science-fiction films tend to be ignored by the Academy for major awards. To break this, the film has to be a very “intelligent” film or have a lot of real-world relevance. This is how films like District 9 or Gravity or The Martian can be up for Best Picture. Today’s film shows another kind of science-fiction film that can get the nomination, and for the most part, it seems to be following this trend.​

Big Brother is Still Watching You

I didn't read George Orwell's masterpiece “1984” until 1992, when my ex-husband found a dog-eared hardcover copy at a yard sale. In those days, the seminal novel could be had for a dollar, and the word “Orwellian” was used mostly by college literature students and folks who liked to bore people with rambling discussions of conspiracy theory.​

​Curls Run the World: An Interview with Wonder Curl

​The Natural Hair Revolution is here to stay. From wavy to kinky—2a to 4c—people are embracing their curl patterns with infectious enthusiasm and watching the world transform around them. Major retailers are expanding their single-shelf of gels into aisles of products to meet consumer demand and creative “curlies” are paving the way with their genius innovation. From drugstore to high-end, there are more products on the market for every curl pattern than most of us curly-haired folk could have dreamed of.​Quail Bell Magazine sat down for some curl talk with Scarlett Rocourt, the founder of Wonder Curl--a brand that not only provides great products for curly hair, but educates “curlies” on how to care for their curls—on the brand (of course!), hair journeys, and being your authentic self.

You've been natural since 1998. What was it about the woman profiled in the Essence article you read that inspired you? How has going natural changed your life?It wasn’t the woman in the article that inspired me, but the story itself. Up until I read that article, I didn’t even know that not relaxing my hair and going back to my natural hair texture was even an option to me. I was taught that long, straight hair was aspirational and beautiful. I remember telling a guy friend that I was going to stop relaxing my hair and his response was ‘but your hair is so pretty.’ As if it couldn’t be pretty in its natural state. ​I became my authentic self after I went natural. Accepting my hair the way it grew out of my head allowed me to explore what beauty meant to me and I gained a confidence that I didn’t know I had.

Moonlight: A Tale of Three Blue Boys

*Editor's Note: This article is part of a review series by Alex Carrigan from February 14-24. To learn about the series, visit this post.

As I mentioned yesterday, I went to the AWP conference in DC recently. The first panel I went to was called “The Politics of Queering Characters.” The panel featured five LGBT+ authors discussing how they approach writing queer characters and building stories around them. One author, Jervon Perkins, talked about how he, as a black, queer writer, was glad to see more and more stories that pushed queer men of color into the public eye. He cited Moonlight as an example of this and having seen the film, I can see why the film would mean so much to Perkins and so many others.​

Reclaiming Blackness

The sixteenth day of February greeted me at my door with frigid winds and overcast skies mirroring the lifeless stone walls of the building to which I was on my way. I had a meeting at eight thirty, sharp. That was the last thing on my mind, however, and it manifested in a slow trudge to my car. Adorned in black. A kaddish scraping dissonance across my fatigued neural pathways.

I was in mourning. For me, Black History Month had ended–or so I had convinced myself.